Society Should Accept Senior Citizens Back Into Our Lives

May 21, 1995

I address your middle-aged readers who, like me, believe that Social Security and Medicare will be gone by the time we become eligible to receive.

I would like to remind them that in the past, children were a person's Social Security and one's aging parents were the nanny and helping hand around the house. They were that extra dose of love and wisdom for your children when yours ran out. People didn't have to read books abut how to discipline or feed a child properly. Your mother and father had already done it before you. (I am, of course, not referring to families with a legacy of abuse).

Families had more disposable income, in part because they weren't maintaining two (or more) separate households. In addition, children learned to respect their grandparents and could look at the elderly in general with compassion and love instead of curiosity and resentment as they do today.

America's elderly population is a valuable resource that is being lost, wasting away in condos worrying excessively about who is breaking rules. If these people have grandchildren, their worrying would not be wasted on them. It would be remembered and someday appreciated.

I suggest we invite the elderly back into our lives and they should be happy to oblige. Because no one is ever done with life until they are dead.